Jamie A. Thomas
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#languagestory blog

Video & perspectives on communication, intercultural learning & the impact of anthropological research.

Media Stereotypes: The Power of Speaking Your Mind

9/24/2018

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A student describes how media stereotypes impact his study abroad experience.Amman, JORDAN: I talked with a U.S.-based student who described how media stereotypes have impacted his study abroad experience.
By age 6, young girls are already impacted by gendered stereotypes of intellectual ability (and media representations of scientists and engineers, for example). This is according to a 2017 study published in Science.  

In fact, there is no doubt that media stereotypes and representations have wide-ranging influence, but how should we respond to these when they impact our everyday interactions as adults? 

Media Smarts, Canada's Centre for Digital and Media Literacy, reports that stereotypes in video games, films, and other avenues of popular culture influence the real-life treatment of protected groups across North America, including:
  • First Nations, Aboriginal, and Indigenous people,
  • persons with disabilities, and
  • people of varying sexual orientation and gender identification.

Moreover, in her oft-cited book English With an Accent, sociolinguist Rosina Lippi-Green, among others, has shown how media stereotypes--even those in Disney films--reflective of ideologies of language contribute to depictions of racial, ethnic, and gender groups in particular ways. These are depictions that have long been a tool of language discrimination in the U.S., as linguists John McWhorter, John Rickford, and others have explained, in separate analyses of courtroom proceedings in the wake of the 2012 Trayvon Martin shooting.

So, if media stereotypes and language ideologies impact young children, popular culture, and the everyday conduct of courtrooms, how do they impact contexts of education abroad? How might it be empowering to speak truth to disarm stereotypes?


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Learning English While Albanian in the U.S.

12/19/2017

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by Jacob Clark

Jacob is a freshman at Swarthmore College. Watch his video on the complexities of language ideology here.

What's Different About Growing Up Albanian in the U.S.?

Jacob's interview of Albanian-speaker.
For my Sociolinguistics (LING 025) final project, I’ve been gathering data on the language ideologies (language ideology being defined as the set of beliefs one has about languages they have access to/knowledge on) of native Albanian speakers who also speak English. I’ve been interested to see if any strong differences in language ideologies occur due to different language upbringings.

  • My first informant was Irisa. Growing up in Albania, Irisa was only exposed to Albanian. Irisa and her family moved to the U.S. in 2008 when Irisa was 8 years old; this began Irisa's interactions with English.
  • My second informant was Erika, born in the United States as the daughter of Albanian immigrants. Erika was exposed to Albanian and English at the same time.

While interviewing Irisa, she mentioned that English and Albanian are divided in terms of where she makes use of either language. Albanian is the language Irisa uses the majority of the time: when she is with her family, when she is with Albanian friends, and even when she is thinking, the language is Albanian. Just as a reminder, Irisa began learning English when she was 8 years old and put into English-based schooling. For her, English is reserved for school and communicating with friends that are not Albanian-speaking. As she shared with me, “I have a hard time expressing myself in contexts outside of school.” 


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20 Swarthmore students from around the world were interviewed about how they perceive language. Their answers may surprise you…

12/7/2017

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by Bryan Murray and Nathaniel Johns
How do people think about language? Do people agree that all languages, and dialects of certain languages are treated equally? In an attempt to answer these loaded questions, we interviewed a group of twenty Swarthmore College students to see how they perceive of language at home and abroad.
Keywords

  • Standard Language: “Taught in schools and used in print and broadcast media” (Genetti 13).
  • Speech Community:  “A group of people who share a common language or dialect and cultural practices” (Genetti 7).
  • Communicative Competence: “Usually refers to the communicative knowledge and skills shared by a speech community, but these (like all aspects of culture) reside variably in its individual members” (Saville-Troike 21).
  • Prescriptive language/prescriptivism:  “The socially embedded notion of the "correct" or "proper" ways to use a language” (Language Files 14).

Students Speak Up.

“When I hear about things like dialect persecution in the news it really upsets me,” noted Matt, a Junior linguistics minor at Swarthmore College citing a recent story regarding the ideologically empowered misunderstanding of an African American man’s dialect that resulted in the barring of his constitutional right of council during an arrest.  Matt was referring to African American Vernacular English (AAVE). The AAVE dialect of English is seen by many as an incomplete way to communicate.

Stories like this are what troubled Swarthmore students like Matt, whom we interviewed.

Students at “Swat”--the local nickname for the College, have specific perceptions of language that impact the way they use it and understand its implications.  Testimony of the interviewed students reflects the idea that upbringing in various linguistic and cultural environments (also known as speech communities) can result in these perceptions. The testimonies exhibit how their perceptions are also challenged by their participation in study abroad programs and their transition to the Swarthmore Community.

The perceptions of the group are shown through statements regarding language ideology and communicative competence abroad.  The group also shares the same negative view of linguistic inequality (the idea that speakers are unequal or languages are used unequally) as well as the idea that different environments shape this inequality.

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Language and Emoji-ology at Swarthmore College

12/1/2017

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by Emilie Hautemont and Rebecca Rosenthal
🇫🇷🇯🇵👨🏻‍🎓👩🏽‍🎓

Language Ideologies and Emojis.

People (especially Swarthmore college students or Swatties) have strong opinions; so it’s no surprise that these strong opinions extend to the use of language. In our Introduction to Linguistics course this semester, we learned more about language ideology, a term for a person or group of people’s views on how language should or should not be used. We decided to investigate some of the language ideology held by Swatties. After all, these ideologies about language have been shown to impact how well two people can collaborate [1], what sort of language appears on public road signs [2], and even if a speaker is perceived as, like, one type of person or another based on their usage of the word “like” [3]!

We looked at two aspects of language use among Swarthmore College students: (1) learning another language and (2) using emoji. Since all Swarthmore students have a language learning requirement for graduation and many (if not all) are fluent users of electronic devices, we expected to see a wide variety of ideologies regarding these two specific types of communication.

Understanding this context, we administered surveys to assess how our peers' communication - both studied languages and the more informal, digital emojis - is impacted by their biases and stereotypes. We asked questions about how students perceived the use of a second language or emoji as well as their personal habits for using emoji and reasoning for learning a second language.

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    Main Author

    Jamie A. Thomas is a linguistic anthropologist and digital media producer. Her forthcoming book Zombies Speak Swahili is all about the undead, videogames, and viral Black language. She is Dean of Social Sciences at Cypress College and teaches at CSU Dominguez Hills.

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